the Clinton administration launched a broad reform eVort. Clearly worried by
the strong third-party candidacy of H. Ross Perot, who won 19 percent of
the electoral vote by arguing big deWcits and poor performance were plaguing
American government, Clinton decided to launch a broad initiative to address
Perot’s critique—and to reduce the chances Perot’s eVort might grow and under-
mine Clinton’s campaign for a second term. He seized on a strategy outlined
by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler ( 1992 ), an author and a city manager, to
‘‘reinvent government.’’ He then put Vice President Al Gore in charge of the project
and Gore, in turn, put hundreds of federal employees to work on a six-month
eVort to develop money-saving ideas throughout government. Their report
listed 384 recommendations, promised $ 108 billion in savings, and pledged to
shrink the federal workforce by 12 percent withinWve years. Gore promised ( 1993 )
nothing less than ‘‘creating a government that works better and costs less’’ (compare
Kettl 1998 ).
On the ‘‘works better’’ side, Gore developed tactics for sweeping away barriers
that, he said, prevented government employees from doing their jobs eVectively. He
made the case for eliminating obsolete structures, ancient processes, and poor
leadership, while replacing them with employees empowered with the authority to
do their jobs as their experience told them was the best approach. The plan was to
replace top-down, rule-driven government with a bottom-up, customer-driven
approach to service delivery. On the ‘‘costs less’’ side, Gore proposed to eliminate
obsolete programs, trim extra layers of management and make the bureaucracy
Xatter, and reduce the number of government employees.
The reinventing government eVort, however, quickly ran afoul of the Repub-
licans own eVort, the ‘‘Contract with America,’’ which sought a far smaller and
more privatized government. Gore quickly had to push back the ‘‘works better’’
initiatives to concentrate on the ‘‘costs less’’ side, especially the reduction in
government employment, which the administration ratcheted up to 273 , 000
employees. There was little strategic thinking behind the downsizing. The reduc-
tions left some agencies with a serious mismatch between the skills of employees
and the requirements of agency missions. But although the downsizing was
haphazard, the administration did indeed hit its target, through an aggressive
program of early retirement bonuses.
Gore became closely identiWed with the eVort, but he got little political credit for
it. He barely mentioned ‘‘reinventing government’’ during his failed 2000 presi-
dential campaign. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration did indeed leave
behind a smaller government, at least when measured by the number of govern-
ment employees, as well as signiWcant improvements in electronic government and
procurement. Despite its political roots, however, the reinvention campaign
produced little political impact.
Soon after he became president, however, George W. Bush launched his own
Wve-point management improvement initiative. He sought to improve the strategic
public bureaucracies 379